Setting Up Your Website For Conversions – Episode 4 – Bell Bytes

In the fourth episode of our Bell Bytes video series, Bell Media CEO Scott Bell takes you through the steps of how to set up your website to drive conversions and qualified customers. Video transcription can be read below.

Intro

Today we’re going to be going over setting up your website for conversions. This is a very important topic for this day and age. A lot of us have a lot of traffic to our website and a lot of us also ask the question at the end of the month, “how did I get so much traffic to my website but I didn’t actually get any phone calls or form fills for my product or service?” It’s not just about having a beautifully laid-out pretty website. There’s a lot more to it than that. So, that’s what we’re going to go over today.

Define Lead Types & Objectives

The first step is defining your lead types and your objectives. So what do I mean by this? We’re going to get a lot of traffic to our website. Some of them are going to be near term sales opportunities and some might be that they’re interested, but it’s a longer-term sales process. So, we want to develop a website that speaks to both lead segments.

The first is a sales qualified lead. Sales qualified leads are bottom of the funnel opportunities. They’re ready to purchase. They may be shopping a little bit, but they’re at the point that they actually want to subscribe or buy your product or service. Ask yourself the question, “what page or pages will sales qualified leads be most likely to land on to make their path to purchase?”It’s a great question to ask yourself when you’re thinking about sales qualified leads and how you set up your website for conversions.

The next is marketing qualified leads. Marketing qualified leads are certainly leads but their sales cycle is more often than not, going to be longer term, these are folks that might be interested in your products or services. They’re interested in your company and what you have to offer, but they need a little bit more convincing. Maybe the timing is not right. So what pages are those particular consumers going to land on? Maybe it’s a blog page. Maybe they’re interested in downloading a white paper. So, how are you going to treat those marketing qualified leads? By making sure that you’re setting up specific pages that they’re going to frequent, with call the actions and actual conversion mechanisms that keep them in the funnel and keep them engaged.

The whole goal of the defining types of objective is to understand how you’re going to develop your funnel and how you’re going to manage those leads throughout the process.

Traffic Segmentation

The second step is traffic segmentation. You’re going to get a lot of traffic to your website. They’re going to come from different sources.

The first (source) is paid. Let’s just say that you have a pay-per-click campaign out there or maybe you have a social advertising campaign. Let’s also assume that there’s a product or service specific message on the advertisement. My recommendation, is to send that traffic to a product or service specific landing page where the content on that page is relevant to the ad that they actually clicked on. This is going to be very important and is going to increase your conversion rates.

The next (step) is organic. We all know what organic traffic is. It’s going to Google, Yahoo, Bing, making a search and clicking on an organic listing. This is something that we can’t control all the time, but organic’s going to need to go and does go to your main website.

The last is marketing – Marketing is a very broad subject, so let’s just take one example, which could be a online branding campaign. Maybe it’s a display campaign. You want, because it’s a branding campaign, for all of that traffic just to go to your main website. That’s one avenue. Let’s also consider that one of your marketing efforts is email marketing and maybe there’s a product or service specific message or offer to your current customers. My recommendation in that case is, just like a paid advertisement campaign, to send all that traffic to a product or service-specific landing page. Again, it’s going to increase your conversion rates because of this right here (pointing to word relevancy). It’s going to be more relevant for your audience.

Content Creation

We all understand how important content is for a website in today’s environment. We need to be able to communicate clearly and actually keep our consumers engaged with great content. It’s very important, but what I’m trying to specifically recommend today is pay attention to the content on your homepage because this is the first place that people are going to land, or your landing page if it’s paid traffic.

You need to answer these three main questions:

What’s your business about? Making that front and center on your homepage or your landing page is really important because you want to capture the attention of your audience right when they hit their website a landing page.

How are you different? So consumers in today’s environment have more power than ever to shop around and gather information and absorb it. It’s very important, really above the fold, right when people hit your landing page or website, what’s different about your company? What’s the advantage that you have over your competitors? Again, that’s going to help you to capture that lead convert and convert website visitors.

Have you set clear expectations? If you’re a small business service, speak small business language. If you’re an enterprise solution provider, speak enterprise service language. This is important because you want to be able to not just bring in conversions and leads, but bring in qualified conversions and leads.

All of this is geared towards grabbing attention and engaging. Again, right when someone lands on your landing page or website, capture them with really good content that brings them in and allows them to spend more time when on your pages.

Call To Actions

There’s a couple of standards that you really need to consider here. The first is, don’t be afraid to ask your visitors to convert. So, having form fills and having different mechanisms where you’re actually asking them to take the next step is important and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for it.

Here’s the kicker: that “asks” should really be relevant to the content and the page that they’re actually on. For instance, if you’re selling a specific product or service, maybe you want to ask them “fill out this form for more information on this product or service” or “call us today for this service” that’s relevant to the page that they’re on. This is going to increase your conversion rates. So, we shouldn’t be scared to ask people to convert, but make sure that the conversion ask is relevant to the actual page that they’re on. Again, this is to capitalize on all of the opportunities that are on your website.

Provide Conversion Options

In today’s environment, so many of us are on the go. Some of us don’t like talking on the phone or a human being anymore. We want to provide these types of consumers options to convert however they would like to convert or communicate.

The first is a form fill. Always having these strategically placed on certain pages of your website can be important because people want information or resources, but they may not be able to talk or chat about it then. Phone calls are always important and the chat feature, which is something that’s being widely adopted right now, is really important for those consumers who want information and answers right now.

The next is something that’s a little unique, but for small business owners who are service based and may be out on the field working, but want to control the entire conversion or lead process, is to actually put a phone number on the website to ask people to text. We see oftentimes with very small service-based businesses, they lose opportunities because people call them on their cell phones while they’re out working and they can’t get to it. People don’t feel comfortable in today’s environment by leaving a voicemail. They want something now. Putting a text-in phone number on your website or landing page for a small, service-based, localized business is something that you might want to consider. Again, this is so you can capture the greatest number of conversions through that process.

Test

Do A/B testing. This is very important because the first version that you put out there is not going to be your best version. So, put landing pages out there. Put website pages out there. Capture information. Understand your conversion rates and determine if they’re qualified or not. Then start changing images. Start changing text. Change your call-to-actions. Then measure again. Continue to do that to try and refine the process so that you can get the best conversion rates and the highest quality leads possible. It’s all about testing, measuring, testing, measuring, so that you can improve and scale. That’s really important.

Be Fast

When someone is visiting your website or landing page, make sure that it loads quickly. You don’t want someone clicking on your website link, whether it’s on desktop or mobile, and it loading so slow and that the user decides to hit the back button and bounce. For you to be able to actually use any of this and to capture as many leads as possible, you need to make sure that your website is fast and that people aren’t saying “this is too slow. I’m bouncing.”